


every sun is getting hotter

by tuesday



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Pre-Peter Parker/Tony Stark - Freeform, Pre-Slash, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23716981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/pseuds/tuesday
Summary: In which Peter doesn't stay dead.  Ever.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 75
Collections: What Fen Do (Instead of Going Outside)





	every sun is getting hotter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



> This fic was started as a treat for AUex for the cursed with immortality prompt, but going with Peter instead of Tony. There's a secondary canon divergence in that Tony and Pepper stay broken up. I hope you enjoy it!

In retrospect, Peter should have realized sooner. There were so many moments that became obvious in hindsight.

When Peter was four, he went running ahead of his parents and fell down the stairs. He hit his head so hard he heard a loud snap. His mom found him unconscious by the bottom step. When the Chitauri attacked New York City, he was downtown with his aunt and uncle. In all the chaos, they got separated. One struck him with a weapon, and by the time he got back up again, the attack was over. May and Ben had been so worried and so relieved, desperately grateful that he was okay, that he never really thought about it, the fact that everyone else who'd been hit by one of the energy blasts hadn't moved again. When he was fourteen, his hand and arm swelled up, his fever spiked at over 104F, and when he passed out that time, he was convinced he was going to die.

He did die. Peter knew that now. When he landed in the river when the Vulture dropped him and thought he'd broken his back, when the building fell on him and crushed him, when he fell down the elevator shaft at the Washington Monument, when he accidentally webbed his nose and mouth and briefly asphyxiated when experimenting with the web-shooters in his room—Peter had died. A lot. More times than he could count, because there were a bunch of other times where he couldn't be certain. Had Ant-Man's hit at the airport snapped his neck? When he'd done a backflip wrong showing off and hit his head, had he injured himself or actually died?

These were the things Peter thought about as he reformed again and again only to turn back to dust, trying to distract himself from the pain and the terror of his impending death by focusing on all the other times he'd lost his life and never even known. It was terrible, but it was still better than thinking about the fact that he'd come back to consciousness alone. It was better than wondering if Mr. Stark had also turned to dust once Peter's first turn was over or if he'd left. The ship was gone, but that blue lady had still been around when Peter was dying the first time. Maybe she was the only survivor.

(Peter couldn't decide which was worse: Mr. Stark dead or having abandoned him.)

Peter's hands were drifting away on the wind again. He could feel it, every excruciating second, as he fell apart.

"I don't want to go," Peter said, but at this point, he also didn't want to stay. The pain never eased. The fear of it never faded. He came together and he came apart. Over. And over. And over. But this time he was alone.

"I don't want to go," Peter said, but he was going anyway. He had no choice. "Please," he begged, though there was no one there. "Don't make me come back."

He had no choice in that, either.

—

He couldn't say how long it had been. It could've been hours. It could've been days. It could've been months. It could've been years. He had no way to tell. All he knew was that when he reformed this time, he didn't immediately start disintegrating again. He wasn't dying. He was alive. He was alive. _He was alive._

Peter collapsed to the ground, shaking like he was going to come apart.

"Pull it together," Peter told himself, teeth chattering. "Come on, Spider-Man."

But it took him hours to be sure that he was whole, that the cycle wasn't going to restart.

—

Peter took stock of the situation and the resources available to him. There were crashed ships scattered around him, including the remains of the one he'd arrived in. Some of them had alien food. A few had water. He didn't know if the water was safe to drink, if the food would be anything more than poison to his human body. Then again, what was the worst that could happen? It killed him?

Peter snorted softly to himself as he put it all together in the ship that looked the most intact. Maybe it would last him long enough to figure out how to turn the thing on.

—

Peter eventually figured out how to turn a ship on. He didn't speak or read the language. That was fine. Some of it was fairly self-evident like the steering column and the radio. Some of it, he could figure out by trial and error like when he'd discovered the dash was damaged in a way that meant that it intermittently released bursts of electricity. Peter was getting a real learning experience here.

Peter wasn't Tony Stark, but he found a set of tools and opened everything up. He fixed it so it stopped shocking him. He also moved his food and water so that if the ship went up, it wouldn't take his stash with it.

Twice a day, Peter activated the radio. When he found out how to switch frequencies, he discovered there were a lot of distress calls on loop. He added his own to the chorus. Those other people were probably dead, but Peter was still alive. He hoped someone took a chance and took the time to rescue him—but he wasn't counting on it.

He'd made one good discovery.

"Hey, Karen, what do you think I should eat today? The red goop or the blue goop?" Peter asked. His mask was up as he investigated the engines. He was pretty sure he could regrow anything at this point, but he didn't want to risk blinding himself for however long the healing process would take, and he'd already gotten to experience one explosion when he'd turned on another ship to see if it was any more intuitive than this one. He'd rather not take one right to the face.

"As you experienced all the signs of fatal food poisoning when you tried the food in the red packaging, I would advise against having it again."

"Good point."

On the other hand, most of what he'd found was red goop, so it wasn't like he had much in the way of choices here. On the first waldo, though, it wasn't like he could even be sure it was food. He might be the alien equivalent of the kid who drank antifreeze thinking it was blue raspberry slushie syrup. Ugh. Peter was just so hungry. Whatever kept him from dying didn't slow down his super metabolism. It was almost worth it to eat something.

—

Eventually, even the red goop ran out.

—

Sometimes Peter tried the radio when he was conscious for it, but it didn't help, just fed back the same recycled messages of other fruitless cries for help. Probably they were all dead by now.

—

"Peter. Peter." Karen was such a great piece of technology. Entirely artificial, but Peter would swear she felt concern. "Peter, please wake up."

"I'm okay," Peter slurred. They both knew it was a lie, but maybe if Karen was human enough to feel concern, she was also human enough to be a little bit reassured by obvious lies. Or she could pretend with him. That would be good, too.

"You're not okay," Karen said.

"We can work on that," Peter said before he was pulled under again.

—

It wasn't like Peter died again right away every time. He had time to work on the ship. His judgment was impaired and he blew himself up a few times, but it wasn't like he couldn't come back from that.

Whether Peter liked it or not, no matter how many times he died, he would live.

—

He lived.

—

He lived.

—

He lived.

—

He died.

—

He died.

—

He died.

—

(He never gave up.)

—

When he saw the other ship, he honestly thought he was hallucinating again. He hallucinated a lot these days.

He'd hallucinated Aunt May, pushing his hair back and smiling sadly at him as she'd said, "Sometimes it's okay to let go."

He'd hallucinated Uncle Ben, frowning slightly as he'd said, "This wasn't your fault."

He'd hallucinated Mr. Stark, face tense with anger as he'd said, "I told you to go home."

"I'm sorry. I want to go home," Peter said.

"We can do that," said the glowing lady Peter was certain was a hallucination.

—

It turned out she wasn't a hallucination.

—

"I can't believe you actually ate that junk and lived," Carol said much later after introductions were made and when Peter was somewhat recovered, hooked up to an IV and eating his weight in real, edible food.

"Kinda didn't," Peter said, barely pausing in shoveling food in his mouth. The one nice thing about his weird, recover-from-anything-and-everything-including-turning-to-dust powers (besides being alive) was that he didn't have to wait for his stomach to recover. Despite having starved to death countless times, his body was ready, willing, and able to hold all the food he was putting in it.

Carol tilted her head. She looked curious, but there was something in her eyes that was also sympathetic, almost understanding. "Tell me about it."

For once in his life, Peter did.

—

When Peter returned to Earth, he found out who'd survived—and who hadn't.

"Kid," Mr. Stark said, and he looked gutted to see Peter alive and, if not well, then on his way there. "I'm so sorry."

Peter didn't know if it was for his aunt and his friends and the majority of his high school's graduating class—or if it was for leaving him on Titan for what turned out to be almost three years.

Peter didn't want to know.

When Tony came in for a hug, Peter took it. He held on. He tried not to cry.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Stark whispered in his ear over and over again. "So, so sorry."

Peter swallowed back his words and buried his face in Tony's neck. He said, "It's really good to see you, Mr. Stark."

—

Peter was an Avenger now, and Black Widow offered him a spot on her global crisis response team. Carol offered him a place on her intergalactic one. Mr. Stark declared this was a kidnapping and took him back to his cabin upstate.

Peter lasted a week before he left for the Avengers Compound.

It wasn't that he wasn't grateful to Mr. Stark for being willing to take him in, and it wasn't that he was unhappy to live in close quarters with _Tony Stark_. But whatever design work Mr. Stark did, whatever plans he made with Ms. Potts over video phone for Stark Industries assistance and intervention where needed, whatever other avenues he followed to helping—it wasn't how _Peter_ wanted to help. He felt like he was going to go crazy sitting still, like he was crawling out of his own skin. He needed to be out there. He'd had three years apparently alone with only one person for contact. He wanted more.

So he went to find it.

—

Peter got buried by a building in an earthquake in Canada and he had to be fished out of a whirlpool in the Atlantic and he misjudged the force on his new jet boots and wind-screened himself on his new lab's safety glass. An upstart villain with access to modified Chitauri tech vaporized him, and another buried a sword in his gut, and another hit him too hard (and subsequently looked so horrified at Peter's crushed torso that Peter wondered what she was doing fighting the Avengers). Peter was back on Earth, but that didn't stop him from dying.

Natasha eventually pulled him aside about it. "I know you can't die," she said carefully, "but I'm going to need you to start taking better care of yourself."

"Or what?" Peter asked. "This is fine. It's not like I can actually die."

"Or I'll call Tony," Natasha said. "And he'll get to have this awkward conversation with you instead, but he'll probably cry on you."

Peter rubbed his face with his hands. He didn't believe Tony would actually cry, but he would probably get that quietly devastated look on his face again that had only recently started to fade. "I'll be more careful."

—

And he was. Peter was very careful all the way up until Scott Lang appeared on the Avengers Compound's doorstep with a theory about time travel.

—

Tony cracked under the twin sad stares of Peter and Scott.

"It's still a terrible idea," Tony said.

They did it anyway.

—

The less said about Asgard, the better.

—

Everyone wanted to give the Infinity Gauntlet to Bruce.

"Seriously?" Peter said. "You have someone who absorbed an Infinity Stone and lived and someone else who can't die, and you're going with Bruce?"

Carol wasn't in the system yet.

They gave the gauntlet to Bruce.

—

When the gauntlet came to Peter on the battlefield, there was no one to stop him from using it to end the fighting the fastest way he knew how. So he did.

Using the gauntlet wasn't like turning to dust. It wasn't like being electrocuted by an alien engine or set on fire by an explosion. It wasn't like starving to death and coming back to a hunger so deep and all-encompassing that he considered taking a bite out of his own flesh. It brought to mind all of those things, but it wasn't like them.

It was worse. Much, much worse.

Peter never gave up. He snapped his fingers. He changed the world.

—

"You're an idiot," Mr. Stark said when Peter was conscious enough to hear it. Maybe he'd said it before, too. He sat down on the remains of the battlefield with Peter, his armor peeling back to leave him in jeans on the grassy ground. "Nat told me you'd lost the death wish, but it was hiding in wait that whole time, wasn't it?"

"I didn't die," Peter said.

Mr. Stark folded his hand over Peter's, the one the gauntlet wasn't welded to. There was no one left to fight. Mr. Stark sighed. He gave a rueful smile. "Oh, no, you died." He brushed his fingers across Peter's cheek. "But you came back."

—

Peter didn't want to go. He'd never wanted to go. In his experience, coming back wasn't always much better.

But maybe it could be.

—

The next time Peter almost died, it was a near miss. At the last second, a familiar figure in red and gold armor caught him before he could hit the ground.

"Mr. Stark!" Peter said, delighted to see him out again for more than what he now referred to as the Thanos Galactic Reunion Tour.

Mr. Stark's helmet peeled back, so Peter got the full effect of Mr. Stark grinning at him from up close, held delicately in his arms. "Don't you think it's about time you call me Tony?" Mr. Stark winked. "Or maybe you'd prefer Iron Man."

—

It wasn't an ending, but Peter was happy.

The world wasn't fixed, but it was getting put back together with a few more pieces.

He had Aunt May and a younger Ned and M.J. and the entire Avengers team.

It wasn't perfect, but it was a start. For the rest? They'd work on it.


End file.
